Myriad nonsense? You have absolutely no idea why I hold the 'worldview' that I do. Are you going to say that all the things I've seen and experienced are complete crap? I will admit that I was never the world's greatest lover of physics, but then we're all different.



I hold Spiritualists at arms length, as they're still Christian and I don't do Christianity. I am fascinated with the idea that we have spiritual ancestors, but from a tribal point of view. I get the 'proof' thing, but it was just how put it down in my post. I guess nothing can be 100% proved, not even our own existence.



I suppose I've had too many people around me who believe you are born and then you die and that's it, folks! But, then, that's my problem. I guess you believe what you believe. I never ever said you or anyone else could not have a moral compass whilst not believing in anything beyond what can be sensed normally. I never preach to anyone and will never preach to anyone. I just share my beliefs based on what I have seen and experienced.

I believe that all of the supernatural things you have seen or experienced are either crap or are completely within the realm of scientific inquiry and explanation.

By "spiritualists" I meant any believers in metaphysical, supernatural, spiritual, divine, pseudoscientific or otherwise fantastical phenomena.

Don't worry, Christians and your likes are peas in a pod when it comes to nonsense. Your beliefs are equally unfounded and baseless.

It's because people step on argumentative semantic banana peels like this.

Millions or billions of christians worldwide claim that they literally communicate with their deity, who they have a personal relationship with. They honestly actually believe this. You say you're not a christian. How arrogant! Are you going to say that the things they've seen and experienced are complete crap?

Beyond christianity, the world is full religions whose followers believe that they commune with their gods. I'm guessing you don't believe them, or at least don't believe that they are all doing what they think they're doing. Arrogance again! Are you going to say that the things they've seen and experienced are complete crap?

Still further, history is littered with innumerable dead religions that you presumably do not believe in. Unless you're going to come back and say you think they're right? HUBRIS! Are you going to say that the things they've seen and experienced are complete crap?



Materialists can dismiss your experiences and sincere spiritual beliefs with the same amount of justification that you dismiss the experiences and sincere spiritual beliefs of billions of your fellow humans. Those billions of people were just as sincere with you. Are you going to say that the things they've seen and experienced are complete crap?

My gripe with Christianity comes from their advocacy of racism, sexism, homophobia and other bigoted nonsense, not with their belief in a God. I try to allow people to hold their own personal spiritual beliefs and often times respect them for it. Their are many gems of wisdom in religion, and who am I to deny myself these gems?

Wisdom like: if you are to be righteous like Abraham, you should be ready to kill your children if the voices tell you to.
Wisdom like: If god sends angels to visit you, and you're countrymen want to rape them, you should give the rapists your daughters instead.
Wisdom like: homosexuals should be stoned to death

But that's the old testament. How about the new testament?

Wisdom like: slaves, don't fight your masters or try to better your life, submit because you'll go to heaven when you die
Wisdom like: you can literally do magic by invoking jesus's name.
Wisdom like: homosexuals are still evil.



Anything in the bible that looks like civilized ethics can be just as easily ascertained from secular philosophy, and you don't have to sort it out from as much regressive trash like "slaves serve your masters." Religions can keep their "gems of wisdom."


Anyway, your post kind of raises the question: if you think it's possible the christian god is actually real and the bible really is the holy word of god, why would you oppose them for doing all of the (obviously, cartoonishly evil) things their god commands? It might be some kind of eternal truth, after all.

Because in my opinion, Jesus, if real, was insane, the bible is just a book, and even those who use it for good are still limiting themselves to just one path of wisdom.

But what about those gems of wisdom you were talking about?

I think that the only way we know the good in religion from the trash is by acknowledging that it's all bullshit, and picking out the things that we already agree with for other, secular reasons. If you're sincerely religious, you're not free to filter out the trash, hence all the racism, sexism, and homophobia.

Belief in god is not harmless. It has real world consequences.

The same is true, perhaps to a lesser degree, of any kind of spiritual or occult beliefs, like the ones we were talking about earlier.

You are confusing religious with spiritual. Religion is believing in thousand year old dogma and following it blindly. Religion is retarded. Spirituality can do a lot of good though. I know many, many people who have turned their life around just through believing in something greater than themselves. What they believe varies, but it furnishes similar results.

As to whether or not any of you believe in God or the supernatural, I really don't give a shit. I did not come here to hear any of you prove or disprove anything, and I think that any attempts are childish. No one is going to change their beliefs based on something they read in a web forum. All you are proving is how atheists can be as militant with pushing their beliefs on others as christians. Do any of you happen to ride bikes with neckties? I created this thread because I was looking for books on the occult. Not to hear a bunch of internet missionaries.

While it might be easy to guess that forumgoers here *in general* have very little tolerance for certain types of music (start a thread here in the Tavern about iwrestledabearonce and see how it goes), there are plenty of other subjects where you're likely to be met with quite a lot of criticism that might not be so obvious unless you spend some time lurking about here on the forums (i.e. a particular love for the teachings of Jesus, or of Hitler).

Fortunately, things like free speech are not held infallible on privately operated internet forums. I'm sure plenty of folk here would've been plenty interested in a thread about the occult as a subject of general interest, but one where stuff like spirits or magick were held to be real things was doomed from the start, sorry.

I'm actually not confusing anything with anything else. Spiritual beliefs are dangerous. (note: the author on the linked blog post uses the word religion, but she's talking about spiritual beliefs more generally. They teach you it's OK to shut your mind off and not question. They teach you it's OK to have a faulty model of reality. It leaves a space in your head where bad ideas can take root and flourish, carefully tended.





I'm not interested in changing your mind. I know I'm not going to. I'm not going to leave occult BS unchallenged, though. This is a forum for discussion, after all.

No he's not. They're just both belief in things without evidence (e.g. faith). There is no difference, really. They're both based on faith and they're both potentially harmful.


Yeah, your poor oppressed internet forum goer you.

Daniel Ogden has published a couple of scholarly works on Roman and Greek culture. Night's Black Agents: Witches, Wizards and the Dead in the Ancient World, Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A Sourcebook, and Greek and Roman Necromancy which is the one work of his I've read and only partly at the local library. I'll soon be getting a copy of that one to finally finish.

Just for fun, I'll humor you with a retort.
Dudes on left and center: aggressive. Dude on right, passive aggressive.

People who actually posted links to books, thanks. I really only have funds to tackle all of them very slowly. I guess I just have to start a reading backlist.

Well, what you believe and what I beleive are two different things and neither of us can prove each other right or wrong.

Ain't no facepalm big enough for that!

I'm arrogant because I say I'm not a Christian? No, not getting that at all. There are many religious factions all over the world who've been indoctrinated to believe in a deity. The key word here is 'indoctrinated'. Even so, I would never stoop so low as to call their beliefs crap.

I am not religious and I certainly don't belong to any cults. Everything I think and believe is mostly a product of myself. I don't have any gods, I only have myself to fall back on and that's that. I suppose we do have influences as we grow up into adulthood, but my family were never overtly anything at all.

I would speak of the things I have seen and have done, but the reception here is so hostile that may not be prudent.

U betcha!

You would probably have better luck on the David Icke or Infowars forums.

Hmh, so you would consider the believes of the flat earth society to be just as viable as lets say..... facts?

Can you prove 100% that the Earth is not flat? That may sound silly, but it's not. You can't even prove you exist, let alone that the Earth is a globe. Seriously, the only thing that we do know is that we know nothing.

Now you're insulting my intelligence.

How do you know that I am wrong? Because you trust your senses? Because science tells you this is an accepted fact?

But...you make it so easy!

If the scientific method would prove that the earth is flat I would accept it. The truth however is that all evidence suggests the contrary.

This has been my last response to you on this subject, because you are obviously delusional.

If you asked me right now to prove the earth is not flat, then no, I couldn't, because I don't have the formulas memorized to calculate its shape or know how the formulas were derived. However, having been presented with the formulas and the methods used to calculate them, I can logically follow them from point A to B to Z using undergraduate-level calculus and geometry and conclude they're logically valid. It's not that hard.

Also, RE: the "militant atheist" term. I completely agree that militant atheism is entirely harmless compared to militancy in religion. What I object to is the response that a militant atheist is only called that because they offend a religious person's delicate sensibilities. If someone is offended by their views or arguments thereof, tough shit for the offended. The "militant" part comes in from bringing in religion where it's not remotely relevant to the issue at hand or bringing it up argumentatively when no one is arguing (this isn't directed at anything in this thread, just my observations.) Maybe I'm just used to living in a college town for 5 years where such arguments are usually fueled by hormone/testosterone/alcohol-driven braggadocio rather than an actual reasonable argument.

You're doing rather well in your unavoidable death spiral towards solipsism. I'd say "have fun!" and smile, but since, in 15 minutes from now, you won't believe I exist if you keep staying on that track, it would be wasted effort.

dude .. can you not see that you're insulting your own intelligence?

I'm pretty much just playing the devils advocate. I personally feel that atheism and religion are both valid. I have found almost nothing that could not be explained by science, whether it has now or has yet to be. Religion and spirituality, and of course, the occult are collections of metaphors that explain the world around us and our subconscious minds. God, to me, is a visualization of the flow of the universe, and the only time prayer or rituals have worked thus far in my life have been on my subconscious mind and how it connects with reality. That being said, I've had some weird coincidences, but for the purpose of this thread, I can only say a reoccurring personal spiritual theme which is, "I don't know".

How I loathe this silly game. "Devil's advocate" is a pointless waste of other people's time, if you don't admit what you're doing up front. You don't get to argue a position and when you're proven wrong, say "oh, I never believed any of that rubbish anyway." That's dishonest.

That said, atheism and religion can't both be valid, because to accept one is to reject the other, unless you want to use some kind of doublethink. They cannot both be true. And you can't retreat to a position of "it's just a bunch of useful metaphors" for a couple of reasons:

1) religions are full of regressive trash. Like we discussed earlier, the only way you know the good in religion from the bad is by picking out the things you already believe for reasons unrelated to religion. In that sense, it's worse than useless, because we have this book full of ancient, evil lies which otherwise reasonable people say "oh, it's got great wisdom in it." It's like picking grains of corn out of a turd. Sure, they could be delicious if I washed them off and ate them. But I'm not going to eat them because I can just as easily have corn that I don't have to clean the shit off of.

2) religions purport to be a model for how the natural world works. If nothing else, they say that god can do stuff, which, as we established earlier, is a scientific hypothesis which has been found lacking. They'd be a lot more useful as a pile of useful metaphors if they admitted from the start that they're not true. They do no such thing.

3) I know a lot of religious and spiritual people. I've been one myself, so I know from personal experience that a funny thing happens when spiritual people are talking to each other. The extent to which they're willing to admit that they think their beliefs are literally true tends to depend on whether everyone present is a believer. It's really slippery. In a group of believers, things become literal that were only useful metaphors in mixed company. For that reason, I'm really dubious of claims that religions are a valid source of metaphorical wisdom.





As long as you don't think your god actually does anything, then you're not exactly wrong, although you're silly. If it does things, we can test it. If it doesn't do anything, why bother even thinking about it?

Because I feel that it enriches my life. I enjoy having a clearer consciousness and I get that through being spiritual. Coincidences happen, and although science can explain them, I find I am more open to them if I am in a spiritual mindstate.

Also about the devil's advocacy, I never said I believe in any religion's god. I just don't like invalidating people even if I personally disagree with them. And I do find I disagree more with religious people's actions as human beings than I do with their concept of the metaphysical world, even though, I do admit it is really silly and often incredibly harmful to believe that there is a god who loves the human race, yet threatens eternal suffering for the majority of the world's population.

So you feel better about natural phenomena when you lie to yourself about what they are and what they mean, even if you *know* that you're lying to yourself?

Lying to myself and choosing to believe that the universe has a flow to it are two very different things. If you have such a problem with anyone believing in any sort of higher power, why are you posting in a thread about the occult. You're trying so hard to come across as intelligent, but instead are coming across as arrogant and pretentious. I don't care if your mommy and daddy forced you to attend church as a child and that gave you a vendetta against anyone who believes in any sort of higher power regardless of whether or not they are affiliated with a religion. I and most people posting constructive things in this thread aren't affiliated with any religion, and I myself happen to be very anti-religion, but we have our beliefs and curiosities about spiritual matters and that actually does happen to be totally harmless, unless I were to end up converting to a religion like the Misanthropic Luciferian Order or Christianity.

So along with choosing to believe that there are supernatural powers at work behind phenomena that you *know* to be tangible, real and very subject to scientific inquiry and explanation, you're choosing to believe some other shit you just made up about me to make you feel better about your position on the matter. I sense a pattern!

...Must be wood-sprites. Clever buggers.

I perceive a flow of coincidence, therefor I choose to believe there is a flow. What I refer to as spiritual is not supernatural by any means. It is the very essence of nature. Supernatural is just the word most people use to describe it because it is very hard to explain. Why do people go to similar headspaces and perceptions when they meditate or perform certain rituals? This is more of the stuff I am interested in. I honestly don't believe that an unrelated ritual can change the course of events of the universe. There are such rituals, but I think most people call them "actions".

And apologies for saying those things about you. You have come across as arrogant, but I did overreact. I don't think our mindsets are so different. I just prefer the rich, vibrant universe I perceive, with metaphorical gods and planes only accessible with deep meditation to the cold, scientific universe where all of those things are just made up with our brains. Call me childish, but I truly enjoy the way I see reality, and you have no place asserting that it could be harmful to myself and others.

Why do members of the same species react similarly to similar stimuli? We'll never know...

Otherwise known as "The Force." Do you see what Morrigan means about this and Christianity being peas in a pod? I can relate to wanting to indulge in imagination. It's fun. But it's like getting in a jacuzzi and calling it the ocean.

God damn it, I was hoping this thread would be about some cool occult-style mythology I could read about while listening to some nice cavernous death metal. I don't believe any of it but it's fun to read, and it makes you think of some cool imagery. It's the same reason I like looking at creepy artwork, reading spooky stories, and checking out old, abandoned, 'haunted' buildings.

Instead I get someone who thinks the earth might be flat, people trying to say that spirituality and belief in a religion are exceedingly different (they're not!), and... just... Drterror, seriously, what on EARTH are you babbling about. You're a textbook example of why people that don't believe in anything spiritual end up thinking that most that do are complete idiots. Think about what you're actually saying here. I get the points you're trying to make (kind of, maybe), but the way you've made that point... I can't even find the words. I quite like debating this sort of thing, but the crap you've been spouting has actually caused me to just stare blankly at the computer screen for a while. You've rendered me speechless, so congratulations I suppose?